After Paris: Everything You Wanted To Know About ISIS But Were Afraid To Ask

This, from WashingtonsBlog, is an interesting, if controversial, take on the origins and development of ISIS.

Some may not like the idea proclaimed by the blog that the West, and the U.S. in particular, were, along with allied Sunni states in the MidEast and Gulf, largely responsible for creating the monster. But that’s not exactly breaking news. Even President Obama now concedes this, as you can see in an interview featured in the article.

What Obama doesn’t say, but I suspect knows full well, is that the blame falls most heavily on the shoulders of those neoconservatives in Washington and elsewhere who inspired and plotted the invasion of Iraq and by so doing set in motion the events that led to Friday night in Paris.

Always remember this simple truth: the neocons opened this Pandora’s Box.

The same forces were at work in Britain when the decision was taken by the Cameron government to topple the Libyan leader, Col. Gaddafi, with similar disastrous consequences. The attempt to more recently do to the Syrian leader, Assad what was done to Gaddafi, set the stage for ISIS’ bloody emergence.

I remember arguing with American friends when Obama began his assault on the Syrian regime that the only people who would benefit would be the hardline jihadists and that America would soon rue the day it turned down this road. But with the U.S. media beating the war drums in the background, my words fell on deaf ears.

The parallels are very far from exact, not least in terms of scale, but reading this history of ISIS and the impact U.S. policy has had on its development, I couldn’t help but reflect on how the stupid policies of the British military and government, urged along by their Unionist and Loyalist ‘allies’, were in the early years of the Troubles similarly the single most persuasive factor determining the growth of the Provisional IRA.

It took the best part of thirty years to come near settling our little difficulty – and it’s still far from solved – in a place that is a fraction of the size of the Middle East, with a much simpler history and demographic make up, with a common language, much less violence and access to heavy weaponry, and many cultural similarities. How long then is it going to take to sort out the mess made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their buddies?

As Clarence Darrow once said: ‘History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.’

Just follow the links. I hesitate to say enjoy but you know what I mean:

Context for Paris Terror Attack: U.S. and Its Allies C-R-E-A-T-E-D ISIS